Why institutions are crumbling (and what comes next)

Hey there,

I've been thinking a lot about institutions lately—not the buildings, but the social contracts that hold them together. And I realized something: we've been asking the wrong questions about what's broken.

The Contract We Forgot We Had

COVID didn't break institutions. It revealed something we'd been ignoring: institutions don't actually protect democracy. Social contracts do. When the crisis hit, we discovered that constitutions were less like blueprints and more like suspension of disbelief—they only work when everyone agrees to believe in them.

This realization is the starting point for a new series I'm working on: Urging New Institutions. It's not about tearing everything down. It's about understanding why the old social contracts are failing and what it takes to build new ones that actually work.

The core question: Can we rebuild civil societies using decentralized tools grounded in aligned values? That's what I'm exploring.

Why This Matters Right Now

We're at an inflection point. The traditional hierarchical models that worked for the industrial era are buckling under the weight of complexity, speed, and distributed coordination. But the answer isn't just "go decentralized." It's deeper than that.

It's about understanding how trust actually works in networks. It's about designing institutions that function like living systems—with feedback loops, adaptation, and genuine participation—rather than machines that demand compliance.

I've been writing about this for years through different lenses:

• "False Media" explores how information itself becomes corrupted when the systems distributing it are broken
• "Fundamentals of Trust" digs into how trust actually gets built (and broken) in digital spaces
• "Reclaiming The Future" challenges surveillance capitalism and asks what alternative futures we could actually build
• "The Future of Work is Play" suggests that the way forward isn't more optimization—it's more meaning, creativity, and genuine engagement

These pieces all point to the same thing: we need new structures. Not replacements for what exists, but genuinely different ways of organizing ourselves.

What's Coming

The "New Institutions" series is my attempt to connect these dots. To move from diagnosis to design. To ask: What would it look like to build organizations that work with human nature instead of against it? That create space for both individual autonomy and collective purpose?

I'm drawing on everything I've learned building Offcourse, working in edtech, and now architecting Rizom—an ecosystem of tools designed for organizations that think like living systems.

Your Invitation

This isn't just me thinking out loud. I'm building this with collaborators who care about the same questions. If you've been feeling like something's fundamentally off about how we organize ourselves—at work, in communities, in how we share knowledge—I'd love to hear from you.

Read the full essay on "Urging New Institutions" and let me know what resonates. What broken social contracts are you experiencing? What would a functioning one look like to you?

Until next time,

Yeehaa

P.S. — If you want to dig deeper into any of these ideas, all the essays are linked above. Start with whichever question feels most urgent to you right now.